China's Rulers Vs. The Tide Of History

December 17, 1995|By Stephen Chapman.

Wei Jingsheng is a sickly 45-year-old electrician who has passed 14 of the last 16 years in Chinese prisons for advocating democracy and has just been sentenced to spend the next 14 years behind bars for the same crime. He is at odds with China's rulers, who preside over a country that is both an economic dynamo and a nuclear power that is coming into its own as a force in world affairs.

Looks like a mismatch, doesn't it? But if there's any sure bet in China, it is that Wei and his vision will endure and his oppressors will not. Democracy and human rights come sooner or later to every country that undergoes modernization, and China will not be any different. The men at the helm of the autocracy in Beijing will fight those changes with every means at their disposal, but they can no more prevail than they can keep the sun from rising.

From the statement issued by the official government news agency following Wei's conviction, you would think he was the commander of an alien military power bent on wreaking untold destruction. He and "enemy forces overseas," said the statement, tried "to overthrow the people's democratic dictatorship, sabotage the socialist system and separate the country."

But read carefully, and you'll find that the worst he ever did, by the government's own account, was assault it with unwanted ideas. His plot, said the news agency, consisted of "establishing an organization to raise funds to support democratic movement activities, purchasing newspapers, setting up a company in charge of organizing cultural activities, and organizing non-governmental painting exhibitions, performances and publications . . ." You read correctly: organizing non-governmental painting exhibitions. That's all it takes to scare the daylights out of an authoritarian regime.

Wei's brutal treatment has revived demands for the United States and other nations to inflict economic punishment on the government by curbing trade. His sister has been lobbying in Washington to get the U.S. to take action on his behalf, lamenting that "if a country like the United States, founded on principles of freedom and human rights, will not even help him, then this leads to the question whether the United States has given up on human rights."

Trade, however, is the friend of China's economic growth, and economic growth is the surest route to the kind of country that Wei and his sister want. The men who rule China suffer from the delusion that they can avoid democratization by achieving higher living standards. That theory, of course, has been blown to bits in South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, not to mention all of Western Europe.

Writing recently in Foreign Affairs magazine, China scholar Arthur Waldron, who teaches at Brown University and the Naval War College, argues that China's rulers long ago passed the point of no return. "For 20 years, China has been growing economically about as fast as any country ever has," he notes. New cities have risen, vast numbers of peasants have left the countryside, education and literacy have expanded and communism has been thoroughly discredited.

Whenever such changes have taken place in the modern world, they have led to new systems of government based on individual freedom and self-government. "Is it likely," asks Waldron, "that China will be the great historical exception--that in 20 years it will be a vibrant economic giant, full of educated, mobile and increasingly affluent people who nevertheless tolerate rule by a self-perpetuating politburo and its co-opted friends in society?"

Not at all. Much more likely is that the current government will be forced to liberalize, like the dictatorships that once ruled South Korea and Taiwan, or else suddenly collapse, as the Soviet regime did in 1991 and as the Chinese government came close to doing in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square showdown. The gale-force winds unleashed by the country's economic transformation won't leave its political institutions intact.

China's rulers doubtless suspect as much. They have tanks, missiles, guns, soldiers, security forces and jail cells enough to put Wei and all his supporters away forever. The disciples of democracy, however, are on the side of history, which has washed away dozens of despotic governments like so many sand castles. That's why when Wei Jingsheng utters the word "democracy," the men who govern China don't laugh; they tremble.